Towards Reconfigurable Embedded Medical Systems

Traditional embedded systems require flexibility and reconfigurable for effective operation. Devices used in medical systems that are life critical must be able to take the necessary action in response to an anomaly, such as the patient undergoing a heart attack or a stroke. Overly complicated operational requirements will be a clear barrier to their adoption, unless sound system-level design techniques can guarantee that these requirements will be met. The key to meeting these requirements is automated adaptability, meaning that the system must be able to reconfigure itself in response the environment. Unfortunately, dynamic reconfiguration itself is non- negligible in terms of both performance and power consumption. We present several reconfigurable design techniques for light-weight medical systems that demonstrate how one can make efficient use of limited resources and balance the tradeoffs between power consumption, memory consumption, and interoperability in an heterogeneous environments.